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Comment by maym86 | Hacker News Reader

Started closing some of my higher value BoA accounts after they started charging people fees for having a low balance. This is predatory and targeting people who can't afford it.

https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/smart-money/bank-of-america-...

There are much better accounts elsewhere so even if you don't care about how BoA behaves you can get much better deals/service with fewer fees.

This news will push me to close my final credit cards with BoA. No need to rush, it took me 6 months to slowly open alternative accounts before closing the BoA ones. They will slowly loose my business that they could have easily kept for the next 50 years. It wasn't very hard to do, it just takes a little patience.

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I have been with Wamu/Chase for a lot of years but want to switch now that they are implementing more fees. What are you switching to? The local credit unions seem pretty good but I know there are other options as well including fintech.

Ally is what I'm using. 1.75% saving account. 0.1% interest on checking account. No minimum balance. They pay all withdrawal fees. They don't have physical locations but I never used them anyway. Phone service is pretty good.

I have started getting in the mindset that I'll just open accounts wherever makes sense for different services. With internet banking there's no need to get everything from one provider, opening new accounts is easy and there is no need to stick with banks that behave like this.

Even if it's too much hassle to close the bad account right away it's pretty easy to take the first step and drain it to the minimum required balance.

> With internet banking there's no need to get everything from one provider, opening new accounts is easy and there is no need to stick with banks that behave like this.

Exactly.

Also, beware that Discover has a nasty arbitration clause that you have to send snail mail to opt out of within 30 days.

Schwab's also an option to look into, the APY on their savings account isn't as high as Ally's but everything basically comes as a package with their significantly better brokerage account. If you've any interest in investing then it's worth checking out.

Make that 1.75% for savings at Ally now.

Yep. Thanks

Make that 1.80% now :)

doesn't opening and closing new accounts all the time impact your credit score, though?

Closing credit cards can affect your credit score because your credit line will decrease from the loss of cards, so your utilization ratio (balance / credit line) will increase. The usual advice is to try to consolidate your credit line before closing, but that might be harder when switching providers. Still, you can easily reduce the utilization by just paying the balance. So closing accounts does not have too much of a negative affect on your credit score. (My understanding is it does not affect age of accounts, because closed accounts continue to "age." Not sure about that though.)

So is this only an issue if you don't pay off in full every month?

Your bank account is not a line of credit. So it does not affect your credit score. It does affect score on another system called ChexSystems.

Yeah that was why I left the cards open but at this point I don't care. Getting out of BoA.

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